


Stories

by bendingwind



Category: Doctor Who
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-26 14:56:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/284585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We're all just stories, in the end. Fora_celeste's prompt at the Hell in Heels Ficathon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stories

_We’re all just stories, in the end._

* * *

Amy’s stories were half fairytale and half memory, and only Mels knows that they’re true. The greatest stories always are, whether they happened or not, and Mels knows every tale ever told of the Doctor. Some she shares with Amy, pretending she made them up, and others she keeps to herself. Amy thinks the Doctor is a hero—Mels knows that heroes only attain that status on the blood of others. They play with dolls and painted blue boxes and fight demons in the ‘haunted’ copse down the road, and Mels lets Amy go on believing that her hero was a good man. It’s sort of charming, in a way.

* * *

Sometimes when Mels sleeps over and Rory’s gone home for the night, they whisper secrets to each other like long lost sisters. Secrets are like stories, only much better and far, far worse. Mels loves them.

And chief among these secrets is one that she must _never_ tell Rory, because he might get the idea that Amy _likes_ him; the story of the Lone Centurion. Once upon a time, Amy tells her with solemn, wide eyes, there was a roman soldier named Roranicus, and he loved a red-headed woman named Amy more than anyone else in the world. One day they met beneath a laurel tree, and a monster came along and killed Amy. As she lay dying in Roranicus’ arms, the Doctor came along, and said that he could heal her but that it would take a very, very long time, and he locked her away in a box while he went off to find the cure.

A very long time turned into two thousand years and all that time, Roranicus remained by Amy’s box and protected it, until the Doctor came back and made everything better, and they lived happily ever after.

Mels tells Amy that she’s been paying too much attention to Greek myths in class, she’s just mushed Pandora’s Box together with Pyramus and Thisbe. And can’t she come up with anything more creative than that?

She read the officially transcribed legend of the Lone Centurion when she was six years old.

* * *

 _Once upon a time, there was a girl named Melody. She was made of cloth and yarn and beady button eyes, and she lived by herself in a big old house with rotten furniture and toys she stole from real children. She liked to watch them cry; it was interesting, the way their faces scrunched up and water fell down from their eyes, and all because she’d taken a cheap little bit of plastic or glass or wood out of their hands._

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Melody, who could walk on time streams. With just a thought, she knew everything that would and could and might happen, every story ever told and every tale ever lived. There was golden singing in her head and through her heart and somewhere, far away, her soul was tied to a blue box flying through time and space.

 _Once upon a time, there was a weapon, and its owners called it Melody. They made it with a bronze head and an iron heart and the flesh of both a human and a god, and they set it forth to bring them justice. It killed where they willed death, but one day it came across a lonely god. He recognized that she had been made of him, flesh of his flesh, and he did not like what she had been sent to do, and so he whispered a magic word in her ear and turned her bronze head to gold, and then he kissed her and turned her iron heart to blood and sinew, and made it beat anew._

Once upon a time, a soldier and a princess had a daughter, and she was magical. An evil sorceress stole her all away, and though her parents sent a good wizard to find her, she was long lost.

This story doesn’t have a happy ending.

* * *

There’s a certain visceral fascination, she finds, in sorting out the truth from the myth. So many stories, all about her Doctor, and sometimes the most mundane and obvious never happened, and sometimes the most absurd did. He’s the good wizard in fairytales, or sometimes the prince that whisks the princess away, and more often than not he is the evil sorcerer or madman or king that destroyed someone’s life. One day she’ll find a story of how he saved the Shahlet of Planet Ten, and the next the story of how a hundred Kalifi died on the way.

She thinks of the stories her mother told, when they were little girls lying on their stomachs and telling stories, of King Arthur. It makes her laugh as she flips the pages of the document she’s studying, which tells of how the Doctor rode in and saved the people from an evil alien plot that involved a robot usurper and some other mostly indecipherable points. Hero-king indeed, with his blonde Guinevere and her gun.

* * *

Reality is fluid. Is it memory or is it fact? Memory is all twisted, tangled emotion and sensation; fact is nothing at all. What is more real, what happened or what was experienced?

* * *

There are a thousand thousand stories of them, and she kills him and she kisses him and she marries him, again and again and again in myth after myth. Some of the accounts are from primary sources, detailed and carefully recorded and stored, and others were passed down through generations and changed and modified and elaborated until they are barely recognizable.

Everything happened to someone.

None of it has happened yet, for her.

She tiptoes along the strands of reality and possibility and story, fascinated by her own balancing act.

* * *

It’s the story of everyone, everywhere; the times when the timing just doesn’t work out, the people that miss each other again and again and never manage to meet, the way they grow up the way they’re told until they realize they don’t have to, the way they love and lose and hate.

River Song is no different than any other lover in the history of the universe, except she is—she suffers every obstacle to loving that could conceivably be placed in her way, and she loves through it all.

Sometimes she hears them whispering in the university corridors about how cold she is, how she doesn’t care for anyone, and it makes her laugh.

* * *

 _I thought we’d pop by and see the Solar Implosion of the Lariet Nexus. What do you think?_ he asked one day. She said yes, and when she returned to prison one of the books she’d borrowed from the university had a section that hadn’t been there before. She smiles and bookmarks it, and writes down in her diary the history she has accidentally changed. She hopes that there won’t be a repeat; she hopes that it will happen again.

“Hello, sweetie,” she whispers as she falls asleep, like the beginning of a fairytale. It’s so much more interesting than “Once upon a time”, and a life where something that wasn’t real yesterday is real today deserves a more interesting introduction.

* * *

There are as many legends of her as there are of him, now that she knows to recognize herself by the right name; the River Song the Revolutionary of the Gamma Forests, Cleopatra of the River, who conquered Egypt II, —

But there, she sounds so very arrogant when she muses on her own accomplishments. At this rate she’ll get herself into the same bind her Doctor faced, too noble and kind and _known_ for his own good. She’d rather avoid the bit with kidnapping people she loves and turning their daughter into a weapon and ripping apart the universe— _twice¬¬_ —just to prove a point.

Sometimes, just for fun, she fabricates entire stories that never happened and slips them neatly into history. Other times, she erases stories entirely. Out there, somewhere, they will happen/are happening/have happened, but they are not remembered.

* * *

 _You know, there are fairly distinct rules regarding mucking about in time,_ he tells her when he catches her. She smiles and winks at him.

 _Time is not the boss of me._

* * *

So she falls through reality into legend into story into myth, with her Doctor and her fairytale parents, and someday she will either be forgotten or she will not, and if she is forgotten will she ever have existed?

She smiles and knows it doesn’t matter because reality is her. She is the center of her universe and once she passes out of it, it will not matter whether she is remembered in other universes or not. She will no longer care.

And maybe the only sort of eternity a girl can hope for is the eternity of history, of books and stories and memory.

**Author's Note:**

> I am not sure if this is fic or meta. Or both. Also I have finally made my peace with the Library, TWO YEARS LATER. (for me)


End file.
